Doctrine and Stability Operations

Policing Africa: The US military and visions of crafting ‘good order’

“…The novelty of the concept of stability operations is that it outlines military responsibilities not just for post-conflict situations, but also – and more importantly, for the argument made in this article – for peacetime situations. In 2005, the US Department of Defense’s (2005) Directive 3000.05 put stability operations on a par with combat operations, a step that for Jennifer Taw (2012: 2) constitutes ‘the [US] armed force’s most significant adjustment since the establishment of the Department of Defense in 1947’. In a clear resemblance of policing, the directive defines stability operations as ‘military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order in states or regions’.…”

“…Collinson et al (2010: 276) argue, for example, that the integration of military and civilian tasks and the engineering of sustainable state–civil society relations in distant spaces provide stabilization with a ‘broader transformative, geographical and historical scope’. Jennifer Taw argues that stability operations have become the US military’s ‘new raison d’être’, as they extend the duties of the US armed forces to include the ‘establishment and maintenance of order’ both in war situations and in peacetime (Taw, 2012: 3, 1).…”

“…6 Peacetime engagement mainly involves training of ‘partner capacity’ through joint exercises or security sector reform programmes (US Department of the Army, 2008: paras 6-1–6-31), but also includes the development projects of US civil affairs teams that are carried out in problematized but non-war spaces, which will be studied in the next section. Retired General Charles Wald argued that phase zero ‘is essentially a conflict prevention strategy’ (quoted in Taw, 2012: 142).…”

“…Critical observers argue that the US military’s development activities are dangerous, not least because they disguise the USA’s real security interests, namely, counter-terrorism (Besteman, 2009; Keenan, 2009). On the other hand, US military analysts have taken counterinsurgency thinking and practice to non-war spaces, arguing that future military engagement in the context of so-called ungoverned spaces will have to be less kinetic, more preventative, and concentrate on the population (Flavin, 2011; Taw, 2012; United States Institute for Peace and US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (USIP/PKSOI)). Both sides would argue that the military’s new modus operandi results in the redrawing of the boundary between civilian and military responsibilities.…”

“… 6. Traditional operational phases are phases one (planning), two (deployment), three (employment) and four (redeployment). In the course of the discussions about ‘operations other than war’, phases five (post-conflict stabilization) and – more importantly for the argument of this article – zero (shaping of peacetime environment) have been added (see Taw, 2012: 215n). …”